Annual Rabin/Brill Lecture: Lesser-Known Perspectives on the Holocaust and Photography

This presentation centers on the engagement of European and American Jews with photography and film in the interwar period, the Holocaust, and Europe’s ‘liberation.’ It introduces an international occupational cohort that has only recently been noticed as Jewish. The contrasts and continuity between Jewish photographic involvement in the pre-war period, the work of photographers during the Second World War (in both Nazi and Allied orbits), and pictures (and motion picture film) from the war’s aftermath will be explored. Berkowitz addresses diverse genres of visual documentation and creative expression that remain largely obscure despite having great importance in their own time.

Dr. Michael Berkowitz is a professor of modern Jewish history at University College London. He is the author of Jews and Photography in Britain (2015), and since 2012, editor of Jewish Historical Studies: Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England. His previous publications include The Crime of My Very Existence: Nazism and the Myth of Jewish Criminality (2007), The Jewish Self-Image (2000), Zionist Culture and West European Jewry before the First World War (1993; 1997), and “We Are Here”: New Approaches to Jewish Displaced Persons in Postwar Germany, coedited with Avinoam J. Patt (2010). He is currently a Cain Senior Fellow at the Science History Institute in Philadelphia.